Voting is easy at the permanently closed Korona Fire Station

The Korona Fire Station has seen better days.

It’s no longer a fire station. Chris and I received a notice that it was permanently closed but it would be open for primary voting on Aug. 18. Good news, as that’s our polling place here in unincorporated Flagler County.

As we left my Ormond dentist’s office (good news on teeth!), Chris called the election office just to make sure we were headed to the correct polling place as we are new to this neighborhood. Mark, Office of Supervisor of Elections, answered. “Yes,” he said, “the Korona station is permanently closed but open for voting.”

We drove east on Grenada to U.S. 1 and headed north. Korona sounded familiar but I didn’t know why. Once we reached the white cinder-block building, memory took me back to road trips in the ‘60s, driving Daytona to Bunnell for basketball games. Driving north to Jacksonville before the interstate opened in 1967. Korona was a blip along the way, a tiny town with a tiny fire station.

Still tiny. But open for business this election day. An election judge motioned to the handicapped parking spot, I grabbed my rollator, and we rolled and walked  inside.

The interior is about the size of a two-car garage. Election judges greeted us. They are paid, these good citizens, but not much. Trained, too. I served as one during many elections in Cheyenne, Wyo. I asked for electronic voting as I need the big screen to read tiny type. They showed me to my seat. I voted. I knew the candidates for the major offices. I was clueless about the local school board candidates. Are they right-wing loonies out to keep books from the minds of our youth? Or are they moderate GOPers or Democrats? I just took a stab at it.

I printed out my ballot, placed it in a “Secret Folder” and brought it to the judge at the tabulator. The ballot then comes out of the Secret Folder to be fed into the machine which is monitored by a judge. He can see my ballot as it’s sucked in. So much for secret. But unless he had special high-tech glasses equipped with a camera, there is no way he could see my ballot and report that there’s another commie in the neighborhood.

I sat in the SUV as Chris went back inside to use the restroom. In the station’s fenced backyard, the weeds are getting a bit out of control. A concrete basketball half-court stands empty. I imagined the firefighters out there playing three-on-three, shirts off under the oaks. Good-natured in-your-face taunts.

More voters arrived as we left. We were stopped at a traffic light at the entrance to Plantation Bay, one of the many housing developments that have skyrocketed the population of a rural county we used to refer to unkindly in our youth. Palm Coast didn’t exist. Bunnell didn’t have a massive new city/county building. Flagler Beach was not becoming another Daytona Beach. Aging World War Two veterans played ball outside the Korona station, awaiting the latest barn fire or fiery collision between liquored-up teens.

I awoke this morning to good news. Democrats made impressive showings in Florida. In Wyoming, 14 members of the Freedom Caucus went down in flames, bested by more moderate GOPers.

Here’s this morning New York Times headline:

“A Stunning Win for the Left in Florida: 6 Takeaways fromTuesday’s Primaries.”

And this from Wyoming’s WyoFile:

“Wyoming Freedom Caucus loses at least 14 incumbent lawmakers.”

Maybe, just maybe, “the times they are a-changin’.”

For some background on the community of Korona, founded in 1914 by Polish immigrants from Chicago and Detroit, see the late Sisco Deen's entry at the Flagler County Historical Society 

Just who is the Batman in this old photo?

The older you get, the more photos appear. Brothers and sisters drop by with a few boxes, say they were cleaning out their closets and would I want these. Before you can answer, they are off in their Kia and the boxes remain. So you bring them in and put them next to other boxes and swear you will get to them someday.

I went through one of those boxes yesterday. It was stifling outside, the Colorado Rockies game wouldn't be on until 4 our time (they won!) so I pulled out a box and sorted through it. There are moments of nostalgia, moments of joy mixed with sorrow. Most are moments of confusion. Who are these people? It seems that not labeling photographs is a family trait. 

I include the above aged and torn photo because it is so puzzling. At first glance, it seems as I am looking at a dapper Batman (note the dapper hat) in the foreground and his offspring in a carriage pushed by his mysterious spouse. But no, because the pic is in with others from my father's family, I peg the foreground figure as my grandfather Raymond Shay, the woman is my Grandmother, Florence, and the baby in the buggy is my father Thomas, their first-born. 

The location has to be the fringes of Denver, looking out on the wide prairie. When Ray and Florence built their first house, it was on the eastern fringe of their City Park neighborhood, so close to the new airport (not much of one in the mid-20s) they could see Eddie Rickenbacker or Charles Lindbergh take off. Rickenbacker cracked up an aeroplane north of Denver in the 1920s and lived to tell the tale. Lindbergh was an airmail pilot flying love letters from Omaha to San Francisco through Wyoming with stops in Denver. He also cracked up a few times but lived a long and complicated life.

The day of the photo: What was it like? It wasn't summer, judging by Florence's big coat and the winter bat cape worn by grandfather. The baby, my father, is wrapped in his swaddling clothes, whatever they are. The fields look bare with harvest long gone. It was just a walk in the neighborhood. The sun is behind the photographer. In the afternoon, it would be heading toward the mountains. Grandfather is probably using a viewfinder camera, which he has to look down into to frame the shot and click the clicker. 

These new parents have been off to war. They met at the army hospital in Aurora where she was a nurse and he was an officer with lung problems. The army sent the lungers to Denver and points west for the dry air and sunshine. Colorado was famous for its TB sanatoria. 

My father, a toddler in the photo, went off to war in 1942 and returned. He met my mother, a Navy-trained nurse in the late 1940s and I was born in the middle of the century.

My wife Christine and I met at a keg party in Daytona Beach and lived our working and procreating lives in Colorado, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C. We retired in Florida. We have a cabinet filled with family photo albums, many of them labeled. We have boxes in closets that our kids will inherit and eventually try to pawn off on relatives. That's the way of the world. 

A young Irish lad awaits his ship, any ship, at the Liverpool docks

The Mersey River at the Liverpool docks. Credit: "Merchantmen-at-Arms: The British Merchants' Service in the War" by David W. Bone, 1919. Illustrator: Muirhead Bone.

Baba, Unsinkable, 1915

Short creative nonfiction by Michael Shay        `

A young Irishman looks up at the mighty S.S. Cameronia, unsinkable. He is my grandfather, father to Anna my mother and Baba to me. I hung the name on him, my toddler-self trying to say Papa I guess. Grandfather “Baba,” all his belongings in a canvas sack, leaves the Liverpool docks and walks the gangplank to the ship’s deck and down to steerage.

This motherless boy is bound for America. He left Roscommon at 12, three years before, cast out by his stepmother, his mother dead at childbirth, father a wayward drunk, older brother and sister already in America. Roamed Dublin streets. Peelers grabbed up boys and sent them to England and the mines. Donkey boy, he was, guiding the animals that hauled the coal. Later, he grew so big, they handed the Irish boy a shovel and lamp. He and the boys replaced the men being pulled from the mines and sent to trenches along the Somme. 

He saved his wages and walked to Liverpool. Along the way, he found a picture postcard of Lusitania and claimed her as his ship. Such a ship. Unsinkable. He waited at the dock with rootless boys, farm families fresh from the dirt. They waited and waited for Lusitania. Heard the news it was sunk. Now he’ll never get to the States. He had saved enough for passage and spending money. He got in the queue for another ticket. The clerk announced that too had been sunk. He waited for the next, the stalwart S.S. Cameronia. Unsinkable. 

Grandpa boarded Cameronia on a late May afternoon, 1915. The ship was five years old. Spiffy little vessel, so said the Anchor Line of Great Britain, flew the flag, built in Glasgow. 10,963 gross tons, 515 feet long, 62 feet wide. Top speed 17 knots. Two masts and two funnels, steel hull with four decks. Carried 1,700 passengers, 250 in first class, 450 in second class, and 1,000 with Grandfather in third class. Port of departure: Liverpool. Port of arrival: New York City. Arrived with all hands June 7, 1915. 

America, at last. Almost two years later, grandfather lived with his brother’s family on the South Side. Worked on the Chicago El with his brother. He swept out the cars, picked up the trash, a man now. It was April; spring slowly arriving. Wilson declared war. Grandfather was stateless, an invisible man. Undraftable. 

On April 15, 1917, just a week after America declared war, the unsinkable Cameronia, loaded with 3,000 English troops, was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean. Survivors rescued by destroyers Nemesis and Rifleman. Its final moments were recreated by mariner David W. Bone who had a fine name for a historian. 

This prose writer shall construct a poem of his words, his exact words, now sailing in history's public domain:

We are little more than clear of

the settling fore-end when the last

buoyant breath of Cameronia 

is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to

the debarking of the last man.

There is no further life in her. Evenly,

steadily, as we had seen her leave the

launching ways at Meadowside, she

goes down.

Grandfather lived to 90. Died abed 1990 in Denver, Banshees in the burbs. Never again crossed the ocean. Or flew it, no yearning to return to Ireland or England. Preferred his growing American family. Loved his grandkids and ice cream that he first tasted on crowded New York City streets. Baba the Irishman, motherless child, donkey boy, train car sweeper, postman, family man, ice cream man, blessed, lucky.

Loss of a Liner, 1917. Credit: 

"Merchantmen-at-Arms:

the British Merchant Service at War" by David W. Bone, 1919. Illustrator: Muirhead Bone.

"Zeppelins Over Denver" lands on The Florida Writer magazine "Celebrations" page

My novel landed on the "Celebrations!" section in the latest issue of the The Florida Writer magazine. Congrats to all the FWA members with new books. Some good summer/fall reading ahead.  

Wyoming Public Radio: "Good morning Wyoming and Central Florida!"

I listen to Wyoming Sounds almost every morning. It's on Wyoming Public Radio. It used to be aired just mornings during olden times prior to 2016 when I retired and began spending mornings writing my historical novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver." "Throwback Thursdays" was my favorite, most of the show dedicated to musicians and bands celebrating music milestones. Wyoming talent was showcased. Grady Kirkpatrick live-casted from Cheyenne Day July 22 at Cheyenne Frontier Days with special guest Jalan Crossland from Ten Sleep who performed that week at a special 250th U.S. birthday bash on the state capitol grounds.

I opened up the WPR site while still abed this morning and heard Grady's interview with Tom Owens. He's a Kansas City author who's written a trilogy on the Kansas/Missouri border wars prior to and during the Civil War. His first volume, "The Chimney," covers the U.S. Army's order to evacuate four counties on the Missouri side of the border so Quantrill's Raiders and Bloody Bill Anderson would have no way to resupply their raiders. The army used a scorched earth policy to move the settlers, kill the livestock, burn the fields and the houses, leaving only a burned landscape of limestone chimneys, thus the title. If this tactic sounds familiar, read about Sherman's March to the Sea, U.S. tactics during the Vietnam War, or Russian tactics during the Nazi invasion of World War Two. 

Owens' follow-up novel, "The Great Wide Open," features members of the Duncan family from the first novel as they travel to locales in the mountain west, including Fort Laramie. I admit that I downloaded both novels for free on Kindle Unlimited. That happened with my novel on its release in May. A mixed blessing. It might get you more readers. It also allegedly boosts your ranking on Amazon. This morning, "Zeppelins" is ranked #667,407 in the literature and fiction category. I believe it inched up a bit. A few more sales wouldn't hurt. 

I contributed to WPR during Wyoming Gives and will do it again. We creators are lucky these days as we can tune in almost any music on our PCs while we write and revise and revise some more. I am doing that this week as I plow through the "Zeppelins" sequel, "Patrick of the Mountains," set in 1922 Colorado, in Denver and in a mountain town adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park. The sequel is due out in 2027. The Ridgeway Press of Michigan published the first book and it is enjoying some modest success among friends, family members, and devotees of historical fiction. 

Ridgeway Press is currently upgrading its web site with a little help from me. Ridgeway was co-founded by poet, performer, and Wayne State University prof M.L. Liebler. It's published some intriguing books, including the collected poetry of John Sinclair, war resister, pothead, and manager of the Detroit band MC5 best known for its call from the stage: "Kick Out the Jams, Motherf**kers!" It also features some of the Trump Sonnets by traveling troubadour Ken Waldman and poetry by Zilka Joseph. Take a look at the upgraded Ridgeway web site. There is no bookstore on the site but links send you to Bookshop.org and to Amazon.

The press appreciates those who request the book from your local bookstores, such as Novel Tea Books or Fern & Fable in Ormond Beach, or asks your local library to feature the books in its "Local Authors" section. Find my novel and story collection in the Ormond Beach Public Library. The reading room looks out on the bridge that straddles the mighty Halifax River. This 25-mile long tidal estuary was once called the North Mosquito River for obvious reasons and probably had a name from the local Timucua Tribes before "Arrival." It was renamed during the British occupation of Florida (1763-1784) after the Earl of Halifax, George Montagu-Dunk, who served as head of the British Board of Trade and Plantations; his name was hung on Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Florida river.

History holds many surprises, does it not?

Buy on Bookshop.org

On the banks of a meandering river in Colorado

Mike near the headwaters.

This photo appeared on a new post on my publisher's web site. Not sure where it was captured but I do thank M.L. Liebler and his staff at Ridgeway Press for finding it. I was just reading about this stretch of the river in Witness to Water: One Photographer's Mission to Defend the Colorado River by Peter McBride. He and his experienced waterman friend kayaked the river from the Continental Divide to the muddy goo at its mouth in Mexico. I never kayaked it. I did camp by it and hike by it and skip rocks on it and, stashed snugly in my sleeping bag, listen to its soothing sounds.

I camped many times at Timber Creek campground in RMNP. It used to be a first come-first served campground but might not be any more. You could cruise up from Denver, travel over Trail Ridge Road, and still find a place to camp at dusk. We also liked the Long's Peak site. Because it was the jumping-off point for climbers of Long's Peak, I sometimes was awakened at 2 a.m.by the shuffle of Raichle boots on gravel as climbers moved out to be up and down the peak before afternoon storms. One thing you learn in Colorado is that hikers best be up and starting down the peaks by noon to avoid the daily lightning barrage. This was brought home when I read Denver Post headlines yesterday about a teen that was struck and killed and four others injured by lightning on the summit of Mount Blue Sky (formerly Mt. Evans). 

I love my birthplace of Colorado. I just could not figure out a way to stay there. I lived there through birth and part of fourth grade and then Dad's jobs took him to Washington state and Kansas and back to Denver and then on to Florida. I attended school in four different states from fourth through eighth grades. Educators would tell you those are crucial years in a kid's development. All that disruption could lead to a career as a writer or worse. That's exactly what happened. 

I returned to Colorado for work after I graduated from University of Florida and applied to every newspaper in Florida with no results. I met a girl (THE GIRL, as it turned out) who grew up in Africa, Europe, and Georgia (the state). We decided to traipse off together, and found gainful employment in Denver, 1978-88, and then grad school at CSU in Fort Collins, and finally found a career as an arts administrator and editor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Now I'm back in coastal Florida.

I am glad for my 23 years in Colorado and 33 in Wyoming. Both states are in my blood that now, on summer afternoons, moves turgidly like that sticky mess at the poor dying Colorado River which no longer reaches the ocean.

Watching The Longest Day with my wife

My wife Christine didn't see The Longest Day when it premiered in 1962. She still hadn’t seen it 64 years later. She watched it with me last night because the World War Two docuseries with Tom Hanks had incited her curiosity.

I did see The Longest Day in a movie theater in November or December 1962. My father took me, my brother Dan, and some of our friends to see the blockbuster either for Dan's birthday (Nov. 25) or mine (Dec. 18). Or maybe it was both birthdays since the two dates were close (as were Dan and I) and it got us out of the crowded house. Dan was turning 10; 12 for me.

I have seen the movie a half-dozen times since.  I loved it as a kid and hated it as a young man and now feel nothing but nostalgia for it. Almost all of the cast is long gone. Normandy is now a tourist draw. But, during that one moment in history, it was the center of turmoil.

Chris doesn’t watch war movies. The violence disturbs her, as it should, and she gets sidetracked due to her ADHD. When I was a lad, the details of World War Two were important. My father was a veteran as were many fathers of the time. His basement den was filled with war souvenirs, medals, photos. His parents had saved every Life magazine from early 1942 until spring of ’46 when he finally arrived home. I devoured those magazines, mostly for the war coverage. I no longer have them but they are readily available online and at your local library. They’re a treasure trove of photos and news stories and period ads for cigarettes (many cigarettes) and toothpaste -- lots of brushing to banish that two-pack-a-day habit.

Chris grew up overseas with her U.S. Army lifer dad, Jack. Their family lived on military bases from Ethiopia to Germany, Virginia to Georgia. By the time her father  retired, he had three wars worth of stories and the crusty demeanor of a Chief Warrant Officer. He and my father belonged to the same Knights of Columbus chapter. We were not introduced by them. That’s a whole other story.

I don’t know exactly what she felt while we watched. She was only two feet away in her recliner (a match to mine) but with a whole different set of experiences. Now we share those experiences, and have for almost 50 years. But we bring our own selves to each shared experience.

I have seen the movie many times. There are almost no plot surprises. They came, they saw, they conquered. Some new things happened though. The segments showing the German side were the most interesting. Will Der Fuehrer be awakened from his sleeping-pill-induced sleep to release the Panzers? Only Hitler can summon the Panzers due to his paranoia and need for control. Waking him is verboten, risky too. So his very experienced generals are at a loss and will lose, but not right away. The soundtrack also got my attention. The theme song played in the background on several occasions as did the dot-dot-dot-dash of “V for Victory.” And marching band snare drums announced the German scenes. Damn, here come the Nazis! Attention!

Chris was impressed with the scale of the battle and enjoyed some of the quirky scenes, like the last vignette with downed RAF pilot Richard Burton and Airborne paratrooper Richard Beymer marveling at the dead Nazi who had put his boots on the wrong feet. Also, the cricket clickers that the paratroopers carried to sound out who was friend or foe. 

It was clear that John Wayne and Henry Fonda had to get in the most scenes – their stars still shone brightly. Sean Connery was in some crucial scenes on the British beachheads. Comic relief, as when he when he hears the Scottish army piper and says that “only the Irish can play the pipes.” Connery was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and did his first stage play (South Pacific) in London. And then Bond, James Bond. Dr. No with Connery premiered in October 1962 in London. As Dan and I watched him cracking wise on the beaches, Connery was already getting famous in Dr. No in its U.S. debut in May of ’63.

I bring all my years to anything I see and hear and read. Chris does too. I can continue retirement without watching The Longest Day again. I think of viewers of the future watching it. In what form of media will they see it? What will they think of the generations who lived in the mid-to-late years of the 20^th century? I hope they are not cursing us. I hope to see that we were striving too, that we spent time with our loved ones while it thundered outside.